How to redirect from various ?page_id= to home page?

Question

I have a website where I need to 301 redirect all old pages that are incoming from old URLs like /?page_id=261, /?page_id=204, /?page_id=2677 and so on to the main home page.

What would be a proper way of doing it? Will something like this in .htaccess work? I do not want to redirect all 404's - just these type of old links.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/?page_id=4&n=$1 https://www.example.com/

Answer 1

You can't match the query string using a mod_alias RedirectMatch directive. This directive matches against the URL-path only. You need to use mod_rewrite instead, with a condition that checks the QUERY_STRING server variable.

For example, at the top of your .htaccess file, try the following:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page_id=\d+$
RewriteRule ^$ / [QSD,R=302,L]

The QSD flag (Apache 2.4) is required to remove the query string from the target URL.

However, from an SEO perspective, mass redirections like this will likely be seen as soft-404s by the search engines. You should try to redirect on a per page basis to the new URL. If the content no longer exists then return a 404.

Answer 2

If you want to do it in a WordPressy way, the action hooks are the way to do so. Here's a self explanatory piece of code that will do the trick:

// We hook into the template_redirect action hook, which is the proper
// hook to be used for redirections
add_action('template_redirect','wpse339255_redirect_old_urls');

/**
 * Check whether the page_id query string has been set,
 * and if so, redirect the user to homepage
 */
function wpse339255_redirect_old_urls(){
    // Check if the page_id query string is set
    if( isset( $_GET['page_id'] ) && ! empty( $_GET['page_id'] ) ){
        // Do the redirect
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        die;
    }

}